Every Trade Has Its Tricks--I Play One on William McKinley--Far Away Party Politics and Political Issues
There are tricks in every trade. The tariff being the paramount issue of the day, I received a tempting money offer from Philadelphia to present my side of the question, but when the time fixed was about to arrive I found myself billed for a debate with no less an adversary than William McKinley, protectionist leader in the Lower House of Congress. We were the best of friends and I much objected to a joint meeting. The parties, however, would take no denial, and it was arranged that we should be given alternate dates. Then it appeared that the designated thesis read: "Which political party offers for the workingman the best solution of the tariff problem?"
Here was a poser. It required special preparation, for which I had not the leisure. I wanted the stipend, but was not willing--scarcely able--to pay so much for it. I was about to throw the engagement over when a lucky thought struck me. I had a cast-off lecture entitled Money and Morals. It had been rather popular. Why might I not put a head and tail to this--a foreword and a few words in conclusion--and make it meet the purpose and serve the occasion?
When the evening arrived there was a great audience. Half of the people had come to applaud, the other half to antagonize. I was received, however, with what seemed a united acclaim. When the cheering had ceased, with the blandest air I began:
"In that chapter of the history of Ireland which was reserved for the consideration of snakes, the historian, true to the solecism as well as the brevity of Irish wit, informs us that 'there are no snakes in Ireland.'
"I am afraid that on the present occasion I shall have to emulate this flight of the Celtic imagination. I find myself billed to speak from a Democratic standpoint as to which party offers the best practical means for the benefit of the workingmen of the country. If I am to discharge with fidelity the duty thus assigned me, I must begin by repudiating the text in toto, because the Democratic Party recognizes no political agency for one class which is not equally open to all classes. The bulwark and belltower of its faith, the source and resource of its strength are laid in the declaration, 'Freedom for all, special privileges to none,' which applied to practical affairs would deny to self-styled workingmen, organized into a coöperative society, any political means not enjoyed by every other organized coöperative society, and by each and every citizen, individually, to himself and his heirs and assigns, forever.
"But in a country like ours, what right has any body of men to get together and, labelling themselves workingmen, to talk about political means and practical ends exclusive to themselves? Who among us has the single right to claim for himself, and the likes of him, the divine title of a workingman? We are all workingmen, the earnest plodding scholar in his library, surrounded by the luxury and comfort which his learning and his labor have earned for him, no less than the poor collier in the mine, with darkness and squalor closing him round about, and want maybe staring him in the face, yet--if he be a true man--with a little bird singing ever in his heart the song of hope and cheer which cradled the genius of Stephenson and Arkwright and the long procession of inventors, lowly born, to whom the world owes the glorious achievements of this, the greatest of the centuries. We are all workingmen--the banker, the minister, the lawyer, the doctor--toiling from day to day, and it may be we are well paid for our toil, to represent and to minister to the wants of the time no less than the farmer and the farmer's boy, rising with the lark to drive the team afield, and to dally with land so rich it needs to be but tickled with a hoe to laugh a harvest.
"Having somewhat of an audacious fancy, I have sometimes in moments of exuberance ventured upon the conceit that our Jupiter Tonans, the American editor, seated upon his three-legged throne and enveloped by the majesty and the mystery of his pretentious 'we,' is a workingman no less than the poor reporter, who year in and year out braves the perils of the midnight rounds through the slums of the city, yea in the more perilous temptations of the town, yet carries with him into the darkest dens the love of work, the hope of reward and the fear only of dishonor.
"Why, the poor officeseeker at Washington begging a bit of that pie, which, having got his own slice, a cruel, hard-hearted President would eliminate from the bill of fare, he likewise is a workingman, and I can tell you a very hard-working man with a tough job of work, and were better breaking rock upon a turnpike in Dixie or splitting rails on a quarter section out in the wild and woolly West.
"It is true that, as stated on the program, I am a Democrat--as Artemus Ward once said of the horses in his panorama, I can conceal it no longer--at least I am as good a Democrat as they have nowadays. But first of all, I am an American, and in America every man who is not a policeman or a dude is a workingman. So, by your leave, my friends, instead of sticking very closely to the text, and treating it from a purely party point of view, I propose to take a ramble through the highways and byways of life and thought in our beloved country and to cast a balance if I can from an American point of view.
"I want to say in the beginning that no party can save any man or any set of men from the daily toil by which all of us live and move and have our being."
Then I worked in my old lecture.
It went like hot cakes. When next I met William McKinley he said jocosely: "You are a mean man, Henry Watterson!"
"How so?" I asked.
"I accepted the invitation to answer you because I wanted and needed the money. Of course I had no time to prepare a special address. My idea was to make my fee by ripping you up the back. But when I read the verbatim report which had been prepared for me there was not a word with which I could take issue, and that completely threw me out."
Then I told him how it had happened and we had a hearty laugh. He was the most lovable of men. That such a man should have fallen a victim to the blow of an assassin defies explanation, as did the murders of Lincoln and Garfield, like McKinley, amiable, kindly men giving never cause of personal offense.
The murderer is past finding out. In one way and another I fancy that I am well acquainted with the assassins of history. Of those who slew Cæsar I learned in my schooldays, and between Ravaillac, who did the business for Henry of Navarre, and Booth and Guiteau, my familiar knowledge seems almost at first hand. One night at Chamberlin's, in Washington, George Corkhill, the district attorney who was prosecuting the murderer of Garfield, said to me: "You will never fully understand this case until you have sat by me through one day's proceedings in court." Next day I did this.
Never have I passed five hours in a theater so filled with thrills. I occupied a seat betwixt Corkhill and Scoville, Guiteau's brother-in-law and voluntary attorney. I say "voluntary" because from the first Guiteau rejected him and vilely abused him, vociferously insisting upon being his own lawyer.
From the moment Guiteau entered the trial room it was a theatrical extravaganza. He was in irons, sandwiched between two deputy sheriffs, came in shouting like a madman, and began at once railing at the judge, the jury and the audience. A very necessary rule had been established that when he interposed, whatever was being said or done automatically stopped. Then, when he ceased, the case went on again as if nothing had happened.
Only Scoville intervened between me and Guiteau and I had an excellent opportunity to see, hear and size him up. In visage and voice he was the meanest creature I have, either in life or in dreams, encountered. He had the face and intonations of a demon. Everything about him was loathsome. I cannot doubt that his criminal colleagues of history were of the same description.
Charlotte Corday was surely a lunatic. Wilkes Booth I knew. He was drunk, had been drunk all that winter, completely muddled and perverted by brandy, the inheritant of mad blood. Czolgosz, the slayer of McKinley, and the assassin of the Empress Elizabeth were clearly insane.
McKinley and Protectionism, Cleveland, Carlisle and Free Trade--how far away they seem!
With the passing of the old issues that divided parties new issues have come upon the scene. The alignment of the future will turn upon these. But underlying all issues of all time are fundamental ideas which live forever and aye, and may not be forgotten or ignored.
It used to be claimed by the followers of Jefferson that Democracy was a fixed quantity, rising out of the bedrock of the Constitution, while Federalism, Whiggism and Republicanism were but the chimeras of some prevailing fancy drawing their sustenance rather from temporizing expediency and current sentiment than from basic principles and profound conviction. To make haste slowly, to look before leaping, to take counsel of experience--were Democratic axioms. Thus the fathers of Democracy, while fully conceiving the imperfections of government and meeting as events required the need alike of movement and reform, put the visionary and experimental behind them to aim at things visible, attainable, tangible, the written Constitution the one safe precedent, the morning star and the evening star of their faith and hope.
What havoc the parties and the politicians have made of all these lofty pretenses! Where must an old-line Democrat go to find himself? Two issues, however, have come upon the scene which for the time being are paramount and which seem organic. They are set for the determination of the twentieth century: The sex question and the drink question.
I wonder if it be possible to consider them in a catholic spirit from a philosophic standpoint. I can truly say that the enactment of prohibition laws, state or national, is personally nothing to me. I long ago reached an age when the convivialism of life ceased to cut any figure in the equation of my desires and habits. It is the never-failing recourse of the intolerant, however, to ascribe an individual, and, of course, an unworthy, motive to contrariwise opinions, and I have not escaped that kind of criticism.
The challenge underlying prohibition is twofold: Does prohibition prohibit, and, if it does, may it not generate evils peculiarly its own?
The question hinges on what are called "sumptuary laws"; that is, statutes regulating the food and drink, the habits and apparel of the individual citizen. This in turn harks back to the issue of paternal government. That, once admitted and established, becomes in time all-embracing.
Bigotry is a disease. The bigot pursuing his narrow round is like the bedridden possessed by his disordered fancy. Bigotry sees nothing but itself, which it mistakes for wisdom and virtue. But Bigotry begets hypocrisy. When this spreads over a sufficient area and counts a voting majority it sends its agents abroad, and thus we acquire canting apostles and legislators at once corrupt and despotic.
They are now largely in evidence in the national capital and in the various state capitals, where the poor-dog, professional politicians most do congregate and disport themselves.
The worst of it is that there seems nowhere any popular realization--certainly any popular outcry. Do the people grow degenerate? Are they willfully dense?
A Libel on Mr. Cleveland--His Fondness for Cards--Some Poker Stories--The "Senate Game"--Tom Ochiltree, Senator Allison and General Schenck
Not long after Mr. Cleveland's marriage, being in Washington, I made a box party embracing Mrs. Cleveland, and the Speaker and Mrs. Carlisle, at one of the theaters where Madame Modjeska was appearing. The ladies expressing a desire to meet the famous Polish actress who had so charmed them, I took them after the play behind the scenes. Thereafter we returned to the White House where supper was awaiting us, the President amused and pleased when told of the agreeable incident.
The next day there began to buzz reports to the contrary. At first covert, they gained in volume and currency until a distinguished Republican party leader put his imprint upon them in an after-dinner speech, going the length of saying the newly-wedded Chief Magistrate had actually struck his wife and forbidden me the Executive Mansion, though I had been there every day during the week that followed.
Mr. Cleveland believed the matter too preposterous to be given any credence and took it rather stoically. But naturally Mrs. Cleveland was shocked and outraged, and I made haste to stigmatize it as a lie out of whole cloth. Yet though this was sent away by the Associated Press and published broadcast I have occasionally seen it referred to by persons over eager to assail a man incapable of an act of rudeness to a woman.
Mr. Cleveland was fond--not overfond--of cards. He liked to play the noble game at, say, a dollar limit--even once in a while for a little more--but not much more. And as Dr. Norvin Green was wont to observe of Commodore Vanderbilt, "he held them exceeding close to his boo-som."
Mr. Whitney, Secretary of the Navy in his first administration, equally rich and hospitable, had often "the road gang," as a certain group, mainly senators, was called, to dine, with the inevitable after-dinner soirée or séance. I was, when in Washington, invited to these parties. At one of them I chanced to sit between the President and Senator Don Cameron. Mr. Carlisle, at the time Speaker of the House--who handled his cards like a child and, as we all knew, couldn't play a little--was seated on the opposite side of the table.
After a while Mr. Cameron and I began "bluffing" the game--I recall that the limit was five dollars--that is, raising and back-raising each other, and whoever else happened to be in, without much or any regard to the cards we held.
It chanced on a deal that I picked up a pat flush, Mr. Cleveland a pat full. The Pennsylvania senator and I went to the extreme, the President of course willing enough for us to play his hand for him. But the Speaker of the House persistently stayed with us and could not be driven out.
When it came to a draw Senator Cameron drew one card. Mr. Cleveland and I stood pat. But Mr. Carlisle drew four cards. At length, after much banter and betting, it reached a show-down and,mirabile dictu, the Speaker held four kings!
"Take the money, Carlisle; take the money," exclaimed the President. "If ever I am President again you shall be Secretary of the Treasury. But don't you make that four-card draw too often."
He was President again, and Mr. Carlisle was Secretary of the Treasury.
There had arisen a disagreeable misunderstanding between General Schenck and myself during the period when the general was Minister at the Court of St. James. In consequence of this we did not personally meet. One evening at Chamberlin's years after, a party of us--mainly the Ohio statesman's old colleagues in Congress--were playing poker. He came in and joined us. Neither of us knew the other even by sight and there was no presentation when he sat in.
At length a direct play between the newcomer and me arose. There was a moment's pause. Obviously we were strangers. Then it was that Senator Allison, of Iowa, who had in his goodness of heart purposely brought about this very situation, introduced us. The general reddened. I was taken aback. But there was no escape, and carrying it off amiably we shook hands. It is needless to say that then and there we dropped our groundless feud and remained the rest of his life very good friends.
In this connection still another poker story. Sam Bugg, the Nashville gambler, was on a Mississippi steamer bound for New Orleans. He came upon a party of Tennesseeans whom a famous card sharp had inveigled and was flagrantly robbing. Sam went away, obtained a pack of cards, and stacked them to give the gambler four kings and the brightest one of the Nashville boys four aces. After two or three failures to bring the cold deck into action Sam Bugg brushed a spider--an imaginary spider, of course--from the gambler's coat collar, for an instant distracting his attention--and in the momentary confusion the stacked cards were duly dealt and the betting began, the gambler confident and aggressive. Finally, all the money up, the four aces beat the four kings, and for a greater amount than the Nashvillians had lost and the gambler had won. Whereupon, without change of muscle, the gambler drawled: "Mr. Bugg, the next time you see a spider biting me let him bite on!"
I was told that the Senate Game had been played during the War of Sections and directly after for large sums. With the arrival of the rebel brigadiers it was perforce reduced to a reasonable limit.
The "road gang" was not unknown at the White House. Sometimes it assembled at private houses, but its accustomed place of meeting was first Welcker's and then Chamberlin's. I do not know whether it continues to have abiding place or even an existence. In spite of the reputation given me by the pert paragraphers I have not been on a race course or seen a horse race or played for other than immaterial stakes for more than thirty years.
As an all-round newspaper writer and reporter many sorts of people, high and low, little and big, queer and commonplace, fell in my way; statesmen and politicians, artists and athletes, circus riders and prize fighters; the riffraff and the élite; the professional and dilettante of the world polite and the underworld.
I knew Mike Walsh and Tim Campbell. I knew John Morrissey. I have seen Heenan--one of the handsomest men of his time--and likewise Adah Isaacs Menken, his inamorata--many said his wife--who went into mourning for him and thereafter hied away to Paris, where she lived under the protection of Alexandre Dumas, the elder, who buried her in Père Lachaise under a handsome monument bearing two words, "Thou knowest," beneath a carved hand pointed to heaven.
I did draw the line, however, at Cora Pearl and Marcus Cicero Stanley.
The Parisian courtesan was at the zenith of her extraordinary celebrity when I became a rustic boulevardier. She could be seen everywhere and on all occasions. Her gowns were the showiest, her equipage the smartest; her entourage, loud though it was and vulgar, yet in its way was undeniable. She reigned for a long time the recognized queen of the demi-monde. I have beheld her in her glory on her throne--her two thrones, for she had two--one on the south side of the river, the other at the east end--not to mention the race course--surrounded by a retinue of the disreputable. She did not awaken in me the least curiosity, and I declined many opportunities to meet her.
Marcus Cicero Stanley was sprung from an aristocratic, even a distinguished, North Carolina family. He came to New York and set up for a swell. How he lived I never cared to find out, though he was believed to be what the police call a "fence." He seemed a cross between a "con" and a "beat." Yet for a while he flourished at Delmonico's, which he made his headquarters, and cut a kind of dash with the unknowing. He was a handsome, mannerly brute who knew how to dress and carry himself like a gentleman.
Later there came to New York another Southerner--a Far Southerner of a very different quality--who attracted no little attention. This was Tom Ochiltree. He, too, was well born, his father an eminent jurist of Texas; he, himself, a wit,bon hommeand raconteur. Travers once said: "We have three professional liars in America--Tom Ochiltree is one and George Alfred Townsend is the other two."
The stories told of Tom would fill a book. He denied none, however preposterous--was indeed the author of many of the most amusing--of how, when the old judge proposed to take him into law partnership he caused to be painted an office sign: Thomas P. Ochiltree and Father; of his reply to General Grant, who had made him United States Marshal of Texas, and later suggested that it would be well for Tom to pay less attention to the race course: "Why, Mr. President, all that turf publicity relates to a horse named after me, not to me," it being that the horse of the day had been so called; and of General Grant's reply: "Nevertheless, it would be well, Tom, for you to look in upon Texas once in a while"--in short, of his many sayings and exploits while a member of Congress from the Galveston district; among the rest, that having brought in a resolution tendering sympathy to the German Empire on the death of Herr Laska, the most advanced and distinguished of Radical Socialists, which became for the moment acause célébre. Tom remarked, "Not that I care a damn about it, except for the prominence it gives to Bismarck."
He lived when in Washington at Chamberlin's. He and John Chamberlin were close friends. Once when he was breakfasting with John a mutual friend came in. He was in doubt what to order. Tom suggested beefsteak and onions.
"But," objected the newcomer, "I am about to call on some ladies, and the smell of onions on my breath, you know!"
"Don't let that trouble you," said Tom; "you have the steak and onions and when you get your bill that will take your breath away!"
Under an unpromising exterior--a stocky build and fiery red head--there glowed a brave, generous and tender spirit. The man was apreux chevalier. He was a knight-errant. All women--especially all good and discerning women who knew him and who could intuitively read beneath that clumsy personality his fine sense of respect--even of adoration--loved Tom Ochiltree.
The equivocal celebrity he enjoyed was largely fostered by himself, his stories mostly at his own expense. His education had been but casual. But he had a great deal of it and a varied assortment. He knew everybody on both sides of the Atlantic, his friends ranging from the Prince of Wales, afterward Edward VII, Gladstone and Disraeli, Gambetta and Thiers, to the bucks of the jockey clubs. There were two of Tom--Tom the noisy on exhibition, and Tom the courtier in society.
How he lived when out of office was the subject of unflattering conjecture. Many thought him the stipendiary of Mr. Mackay, the multimillionaire, with whom he was intimate, who told me he could never induce Tom to take money except for service rendered. Among his familiars was Colonel North, the English money magnate, who said the same thing. He had a widowed sister in Texas to whom he regularly sent an income sufficient for herself and family. And when he died, to the surprise of every one, he left his sister quite an accumulation. He had never been wholly a spendthrift. Though he lived well at Chamberlin's in Washington and the Waldorf in New York he was careful of his credit and his money. I dare say he was not unfortunate in the stock market. He never married and when he died, still a youngish man as modern ages go, all sorts of stories were told of him, and the space writers, having a congenial subject, disported themselves voluminously. Inevitably most of their stories were apocryphal.
I wonder shall we ever get any real truth out of what is called history? There are so many sides to it and such a confusing din of voices. How much does old Sam Johnson owe of the fine figure he cuts to Boswell, and, minus Boswell, how much would be left of him? For nearly a century the Empress Josephine was pictured as the effigy of the faithful and suffering wife sacrificed upon the altar of unprincipled and selfish ambition--lovelorn, deserted, heartbroken. It was Napoleon, not Josephine, except in her pride, who suffered. Who shall tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about Hamilton; about Burr; about Cæsar, Caligula and Cleopatra? Did Washington, when he was angry, swear like a trooper? What was the matter with Nero?
One evening Edward King and I were dining in the Champs Elysées when he said: "There is a new coon--a literary coon--come to town. He is a Scotchman and his name is Robert Louis Stevenson." Then he told me of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At that moment the subject of our talk was living in a kind of self-imposed penury not half a mile away. Had we known this we could have ended the poor fellow's struggle with his pride and ambition then and there; have put him in the way of sure work and plenty of it; perhaps have lengthened, certainly have sweetened, his days, unless it be true that he was one of the impossibles, as he may easily be conceived to have been from reading his wayward biography and voluminous correspondence.
To a young Kentuckian, one of "my boys," was given the opportunity to see the last of him and to bury him in far-away Samoa, whither he had taken himself for the final adventure and where he died, having attained some measure of the dreams he had cherished, and, let us hope, happy in the consciousness of the achievement.
I rather think Stevenson should be placed at the head of the latter-day fictionists. But fashions in literature as in dress are ever changing. Washington Irving was the first of our men of letters to obtain foreign recognition. While the fires of hate between Great Britain and America were still burning he wrote kindly and elegantly of England and the English, and was accepted on both sides of the ocean. Taking his style from Addison and Goldsmith, he emulated their charity and humor; he went to Spain and in the same deft way he pictured the then unknown byways of the land of dreams; and coming home again he peopled the region of the Hudson with the beings of legend and fancy which are dear to us.
He became our national man of letters. He stood quite at the head of our literature, giving the lie to the scornful query, "Who reads an American book?" As a pioneer he will always be considered; as a simple and vivid writer of things familiar and entertaining he will probably always be read; but as an originator literary history will hardly place him very high. There Bret Harte surely led him. The Tales of the Argonauts as works of creative fancy exceed the Sketches of Washington Irving alike in wealth of color and humor, in pathos and dramatic action.
Some writers make an exception of the famous Sleepy Hollow story. But they have in mind the Rip Van Winkle of Jefferson and Boucicault, not the rather attenuated story of Irving, which--as far as the twenty years of sleep went--was borrowed from an old German legend.
Mark Twain and Bret Harte, however, will always be bracketed with Washington Irving. Of the three I incline to the opinion that Mark Twain did the broadest and strongest work. His imagination had wider reach than Irving's. There is nowhere, as there is in Harte, the suspicion either of insincerity or of artificiality. Irving's humor was the humor of Sir Roger de Coverley and the Vicar of Wakefield. It is old English. Mark Twain's is his own--American through and through to the bone. I am not unmindful of Cooper and Hawthorne, of Longfellow, of Lowell and of Poe, but speak of Irving as the pioneer American man of letters, and of Mark Twain and Bret Harte as American literature's most conspicuous and original modern examples.
The Profession of Journalism--Newspapers and Editors in America--Bennett, Greeley and Raymond--Forney and Dana--The Education of a Journalist
The American newspaper has had, even in my time, three separate and distinct epochs; the thick-and-thin, more or less servile party organ; the personal, one-man-controlled, rather blatant and would-be independent; and the timorous, corporation, or family-owned billboard of such news as the ever-increasing censorship of a constantly centralizing Federal Government will allow.
This latter appears to be its present state. Neither its individuality nor its self-exploitation, scarcely its grandiose pretension, remains. There continues to be printed in large type an amount of shallow stuff that would not be missed if it were omitted altogether. But, except as a bulletin of yesterday's doings, limited, the daily newspaper counts for little, the single advantage of the editor--in case there is an editor--that is, one clothed with supervising authority who "edits"--being that he reaches the public with his lucubrations first, the sanctity that once hedged the editorial "we" long since departed.
The editor dies, even as the actor, and leaves no copy. Editorial reputations have been as ephemeral as the publications which gave them contemporary importance. Without going as far back as the Freneaus and the Callenders, who recalls the names of Mordecai Mannasseh Noah, of Edwin Crosswell and of James Watson Webb? In their day and generation they were influential and distinguished journalists. There are dozens of other names once famous but now forgotten; George Wilkins Kendall; Gerard Hallock; Erastus Brooks; Alexander Bullitt; Barnwell Rhett; Morton McMichael; George William Childs, even Thomas Ritchie, Duff Green and Amos Kendall. "Gales and Seaton" sounds like a trade-mark; but it stood for not a little and lasted a long time in the National Capital, where newspaper vassalage and the public printing went hand-in-hand.
For a time the duello flourished. There were frequent "affairs of honor"--notably about Richmond in Virginia and Charleston in South Carolina--sometimes fatal meetings, as in the case of John H. Pleasants and one of the sons of Thomas Ritchie in which Pleasants was killed, and the yet more celebrated affair between Graves, of Kentucky, and Cilley, of Maine, in which Cilley was killed; Bladensburg the scene, and the refusal of Cilley to recognize James Watson Webb the occasion.
I once had an intimate account of this duel with all the cruel incidents from Henry A. Wise, a party to it, and a blood-curdling narrative it made. They fought with rifles at thirty paces, and Cilley fell on the third fire. It did much to discredit duelling in the South. The story, however, that Graves was so much affected that thereafter he could never sleep in a darkened chamber had no foundation whatever, a fact I learned from my associate in the old Louisville Journal and later in The Courier-Journal, Mr. Isham Henderson, who was a brother-in-law of Mr. Graves, his sister, Mrs. Graves, being still alive. The duello died at length. There was never sufficient reason for its being. It was both a vanity and a fad. In Hopkinson Smith's "Col. Carter of Cartersville," its real character is hit off to the life.
When very early, rather too early, I found myself in the saddle, Bennett and Greeley and Raymond in New York, and Medill and Storey in Chicago, were yet alive and conspicuous figures in the newspaper life of the time. John Bigelow, who had retired from the New York Evening Post, was Minister to France. Halstead was coming on, but, except as a correspondent, Whitelaw Reid had not "arrived." The like was true of "Joe" McCullagh, who, in the same character, divided the newspaper reading attention of the country with George Alfred Townsend and Donn Piatt. Joseph Medill was withdrawing from the Chicago Tribune in favor of Horace White, presently to return and die in harness--a man of sterling intellect and character--and Wilbur F. Storey, his local rival, who was beginning to show signs of the mental malady that, developed into monomania, ultimately ended his life in gloom and despair, wrecking one of the finest newspaper properties outside of New York. William R. Nelson, who was to establish a really great newspaper in Kansas City, was still a citizen of Ft. Wayne.
James Gordon Bennett, the elder, seemed then to me, and has always seemed, the real founder of the modern newspaper as a vehicle of popular information, and, in point of apprehension, at least, James Gordon Bennett, the younger, did not fall behind his father. What was, and might have been regarded and dismissed as a trivial slander drove him out of New York and made him the greater part of his life a resident of Paris, where I was wont to meet and know much of him.
The New York Herald, under father and son, attained enormous prosperity, prestige and real power. It suffered chiefly from what they call in Ireland "absentee landlordism." Its "proprietor," for he never described himself as its "editor," was a man of exquisite sensibilities--a "despot" of course--whom nature created for a good citizen, a good husband and the head of a happy domestic fabric. He should have married the woman of his choice, for he was deeply in love with her and never ceased to love her, forty years later leaving her in his will a handsome legacy.
Crossing the ocean with the "Commodore," as he was called by his familiars, not long after he had taken up his residence abroad, naturally we fell occasionally into shop talk. "What would you do," he once said, "if you owned the Herald?" "Why," I answered, "I would stay in New York and edit it;" and then I proceeded, "but you mean to ask me what I think you ought to do with it?" "Yes," he said, "that is about the size of it."
"Well, Commodore," I answered, "if I were you, when we get in I would send for John Cockerill and make him managing editor, and for John Young, and put him in charge of the editorial page, and then I would go and lose myself in the wilds of Africa."
He adopted the first two of these suggestions. John A. Cockerill was still under contract with Joseph Pulitzer and could not accept for a year or more. He finally did accept and died in the Bennett service. John Russell Young took the editorial page and was making it "hum" when a most unaccountable thing happened. I was amazed to receive an invitation to a dinner he had tendered and was about to give to the quondam Virginian and just elected New York Justice Roger A. Pryor. "Is Young gone mad," I said to myself, "or can he have forgotten that the one man of all the world whom the House of Bennett can never forget, or forgive, is Roger A. Pryor?"
The Bennett-Pry or quarrel had been acause célèbrewhen John Young was night editor of the Philadelphia Press and I was one of its Washington correspondents. Nothing so virulent had ever passed between an editor and a Congressman. In one of his speeches Pryor had actually gone the length of rudely referring to Mrs. James Gordon Bennett.
The dinner was duly given. But it ended John's connection with the Herald and his friendly relations with the owner of the Herald. The incident might be cited as among "The Curiosities of Journalism," if ever a book with that title is written. John's "break" was so bad that I never had the heart to ask him how he could have perpetrated it.
The making of an editor is a complex affair. Poets and painters are said to be born. Editors and orators are made. Many essential elements enter into the editorial fabrication; need to be concentrated upon and embodied by a single individual, and even, with these, environment is left to supply the opportunity and give the final touch.
Aptitude, as the first ingredient, goes without saying of every line of human endeavor. We have the authority of the adage for the belief that it is not possible to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Yet have I known some unpromising tyros mature into very capable workmen.
The modern newspaper, as we know it, may be fairly said to have been the invention of James Gordon Bennett, the elder. Before him there were journals, not newspapers. When he died he had developed the news scheme in kind, though not in the degree that we see so elaborate and resplendent in New York and other of the leading centers of population. Mr. Bennett had led a vagrant and varied life when he started the Herald. He had been many things by turns, including a writer of verses and stories, but nothing very successful nor very long. At length he struck a central idea--a really great, original idea--the idea of printing the news of the day, comprising the History of Yesterday, fully and fairly, without fear or favor. He was followed by Greeley and Raymond--making a curious and very dissimilar triumvirate--and, at longer range, by Prentice and Forney, by Bowles and Dana, Storey, Medill and Halstead. All were marked men; Greeley a writer and propagandist; Raymond a writer, declaimer and politician; Prentice a wit and partisan; Dana a scholar and an organizer; Bowles a man both of letters and affairs. The others were men of all work, writing and fighting their way to the front, but possessing the "nose for news," using the Bennett formula and rescript as the basis of their serious efforts, and never losing sight of it. Forney had been a printer. Medill and Storey were caught young by the lure of printer's ink. Bowles was born and reared in the office of the Springfield Republican, founded by his father, and Halstead, a cross betwixt a pack horse and a race horse, was broken to harness before he was out of his teens.
Assuming journalism, equally with medicine and law, to be a profession, it is the only profession in which versatility is not a disadvantage. Specialism at the bar, or by the bedside, leads to perfection and attains results. The great doctor is the great surgeon or the great prescriptionist--he cannot be great in both--and the great lawyer is rarely great, if ever, as counselor and orator.
Henry Watterson--From a painting by Louis Mark in the Manhattan Club, New YorkHenry Watterson--From a painting by Louis Mark in the Manhattan Club, New York
The great editor is by no means the great writer. But he ought to be able to write and must be a judge of writing. The newspaper office is a little kingdom. The great editor needs to know and does know every range of it between the editorial room, the composing room and the pressroom. He must hold well in hand everybody and every function, having risen, as it were, step-by-step from the ground floor to the roof. He should be level-headed, yet impressionable; sympathetic, yet self-possessed; able quickly to sift, detect and discriminate; of various knowledge, experience and interest; the cackle of the adjacent barnyard the noise of the world to his eager mind and pliant ear. Nothing too small for him to tackle, nothing too great, he should keep to the middle of the road and well in rear of the moving columns; loving his art--for such it is--for art's sake; getting his sufficiency, along with its independence, in the public approval and patronage, seeking never anything further for himself. Disinterestedness being the soul of successful journalism, unselfish devotion to every noble purpose in public and private life, he should say to preferment, as to bribers, "get behind me, Satan." Whitelaw Reid, to take a ready and conspicuous example, was a great journalist, but rather early in life he abandoned journalism for office and became a figure in politics and diplomacy so that, as in the case of Franklin, whose example and footsteps in the main he followed, he will be remembered rather as the Ambassador than as the Editor.
More and more must these requirements be fulfilled by the aspiring journalist. As the world passes from the Rule of Force--force of prowess, force of habit, force of convention--to the Rule of Numbers, the daily journal is destined, if it survives as a power, to become the teacher--the very Bible--of the people. The people are already beginning to distinguish between the wholesome and the meretricious in their newspapers. Newspaper owners, likewise, are beginning to realize the value of character. Instances might be cited where the public, discerning some sinister but unseen power behind its press, has slowly yet surely withdrawn its confidence and support. However impersonal it pretends to be, with whatever of mystery it affects to envelop itself, the public insists upon some visible presence. In some States the law requires it. Thus "personal journalism" cannot be escaped, and whether the "one-man power" emanates from the Counting Room or the Editorial Room, as they are called, it must be clear and answerable, responsive to the common weal, and, above all, trustworthy.
John Weiss Forney was among the most conspicuous men of his time. He was likewise one of the handsomest. By nature and training a journalist, he played an active, not to say an equivocal, part in public life-at the outset a Democratic and then a Republican leader.
Born in the little town of Lancaster, it was his mischance to have attached himself early in life to the fortunes of Mr. Buchanan, whom he long served with fidelity and effect. But when Mr. Buchanan came to the Presidency, Forney, who aspired first to a place in the Cabinet, which was denied him, and then to a seat in the Senate, for which he was beaten--through flagrant bribery, as the story ran--was left out in the cold. Thereafter he became something of a political adventurer.
The days of the newspaper "organ" aproached their end. Forney's occupation, like Othello's, was gone, for he was nothing if not an organ grinder. Facile with pen and tongue, he seemed a born courtier--a veritable Dalgetty, whose loyal devotion to his knight-at-arms deserved better recognition than the cold and wary Pennsylvania chieftain was willing to give. It is only fair to say that Forney's character furnished reasonable excuse for this neglect and apparent ingratitude. The row between them, however, was party splitting. As the friend and backer of Douglas, and later along a brilliant journalistic soldier of fortune, Forney did as much as any other man to lay the Democratic party low.
I can speak of him with a certain familiarity and authority, for I was one of his "boys." I admired him greatly and loved him dearly. Most of the young newspaper men about Philadelphia and Washington did so. He was an all-around modern journalist of the first class. Both as a newspaper writer and creator and manager, he stood upon the front line, rating with Bennett and Greeley and Raymond. He first entertained and then cultivated the thirst for office, which proved the undoing of Greeley and Raymond, and it proved his undoing. He had a passion for politics. He would shine in public life. If he could not play first fiddle he would take any other instrument. Thus failing of a Senatorship, he was glad to get the Secretaryship of the Senate, having been Clerk of the House.
He was bound to be in the orchestra. In those days newspaper independence was little known. Mr. Greeley was willing to play bottle-holder to Mr. Seward, Mr. Prentice to Mr. Clay. James Gordon Bennett, the elder, and later his son, James Gordon Bennett, the younger, challenged this kind of servility. The Herald stood at the outset of its career manfully in the face of unspeakable obloquy against it. The public understood it and rose to it. The time came when the elder Bennett was to attain official as well as popular recognition. Mr. Lincoln offered him the French mission and Mr. Bennett declined it. He was rich and famous, and to another it might have seemed a kind of crowning glory. To him it seemed only a coming down--a badge of servitude--a lowering of the flag of independent journalism under which, and under which alone, he had fought all his life.
Charles A. Dana was not far behind the Bennetts in his independence. He well knew what parties and politicians are. The most scholarly and accomplished of American journalists, he made the Sun "shine for all," and, during the years of his active management, a most prosperous property. It happened that whilst I was penny-a-lining in New York I took a piece of space work--not very common in those days--to the Tribune and received a few dollars for it. Ten years later, meeting Mr. Dana at dinner, I recalled the circumstance, and thenceforward we became the best of friends. Twice indeed we had runabouts together in foreign lands. His house in town, and the island home called Dorsoris, which he had made for himself, might not inaptly be described as very shrines of hospitality and art, the master of the house a virtuoso in music and painting no less than in letters. One might meet under his roof the most diverse people, but always interesting and agreeable people. Perhaps at times he carried his aversions a little too far. But he had reasons for them, and a man of robust temperament and habit, it was not in him to sit down under an injury, or fancied injury. I never knew a more efficient journalist. What he did not know about a newspaper, was scarcely worth knowing.
In my day Journalism has made great strides. It has become a recognized profession. Schools of special training are springing up here and there. Several of the universities have each its College of Journalism. The tendency to discredit these, which was general and pronounced at the start, lowers its tone and grows less confident.
Assuredly there is room for special training toward the making of an editor. Too often the newspaper subaltern obtaining promotion through aptitudes peculiarly his own, has failed to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge of his art. He has been too busy seeking "scoops" and doing "stunts" to concern himself about perspectives, principles, causes and effects, probable impressions and consequences, or even to master the technical details which make such a difference in the preparation of matter intended for publication and popular perusal. The School of Journalism may not be always able to give him the needful instruction. But it can set him in the right direction and better prepare him to think and act for himself.